Keep up with everything happening in The Commons by signing up for the Chronicle’s Philanthropy Today newsletter or our weekly Commons LinkedIn newsletter.
More than 30 years after both Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich championed climate change as a bipartisan issue, and despite more than $100 billion in persuasion campaigns, both the planet and the politics of the issue are hotter than ever. Indeed, climate is now a profitable wedge issue exploited by media and political strategists to keep Americans polarized and drive extreme voters to the polls.
How did climate philanthropists go so wrong? Of course, we all have had wins, but each of us has also made mistakes. Let’s stop just blaming Big Oil, Republican denial, and apathetic voters. As a community, we’ve brought about our failure. We need to end our denial, look at our mistakes honestly, and chart a more effective course.
But to turn the losses into wins, we have to understand what we’ve done wrong — and change. Here are our seven nominations for climate philanthropy’s biggest mistakes — and how to correct them. The two of us don’t claim to have it all right. We present these to provoke you and others to add, subtract, refine, and improve on them all.
1. Stop funding groups that police climate speech. Climate campaigns rely too heavily on apocalyptic messaging, which induces paralysis, despair, and denial, rather than engagement. Offering mere survival in exchange for sacrifice isn’t compelling — people want better futures, not just less-bad ones.
It’s not always smart for progressives to follow the word “climate” with “crisis” and scare people to death. It’s counterproductive to insist that conservatives recite the words “climate change is real and caused by humans,” bowing their heads in submission. Let them express their support using words they choose.
Above all, invest in positive messages about a better future. Imagine a future of abundance, not poverty, freed from fuel-driven consumerism and the unhealthy centralization and concentration of power that goes with it. Stop pushing socialism as an antidote to capitalism — that’s a battle for the 1940s. Remember that big is powerful, but small is beautiful. Abundance happens as we learn to do and be more, and pollute and waste less.
2. Reach across the political spectrum — especially to moms. Efforts to “broaden the base” typically focus on progressive identities while ignoring or even scorning rural, conservative, and working-class constituencies. This has left half the country outside the tent, despite shared interests in security, health, and self-reliance.
Everyday Americans are worried about the future. We all know our children are under assault. Digital triggers, social media addictions, and environmental poisons worry us as parents every day. We all see it and talk about it. Whether it’s toxic food, clothing, or digital messages, we want to protect our children from danger.
Moms are powerful, sensible, and uncompromising allies. They control $7.3 trillion, 41 percent of consumer spending. Their nearly 40 million votes — 25 percent of the total in 2024 — decide who wins every close race. Every brand, every supplier, every lawmaker, and every advertiser depends on moms. But the political and media complex — bent on maintaining a polarizing duopoly — keeps them from uniting. We can help awaken their power, amplify their voices, and make climate solutions integral to their commitment to a healthy future for children.
3. Shape and champion campaigns of all kinds. The push for unified, top-down strategies has stifled innovation and flexibility. Diverse, decentralized movements that overlap with one another are often seen as inefficient, to be replaced by consolidated, top-down campaigns run by professionals whose decisions are rational and data-driven.
That’s great for perpetuating the status quo, but not for mobilizing change. Rather than coaxing potential climate activists to think like we do or follow wonky insiders or true-believing climate warriors, we should help them to discover our cause inside theirs. We need to join, shape, and champion campaigns for energy dominance, affordable electricity, and “build, baby, build” initiatives. Work inside their campaigns to scale wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydrogen, and oil and gas with methane controls and carbon capture. Support permitting reforms and incentive frameworks that create jobs and prosperity not for lucky individual landowners, but for underestimated, often exploited communities. Stop funding or aligning with anti-growth NIMBYism and instead back Yes In My Backyard campaigns to build out smart grids and upgrade our energy infrastructure.
4. Stop betting it all on a Democratic sweep. Climate philanthropy aligns too closely with Democratic Party politics. We bet everything on Democrats winning it all — the courts, Congress, the White House. We aim our messages and policies overwhelmingly at blue America, writing off half the country and alienating conservatives and libertarians who might otherwise support innovation, local control, or market-based approaches to emissions reduction.
We starve most authentic pro-climate conservative-leaning groups of funding. Less than 1 percent of education and advocacy grants go to right-of-center NGOs, forcing our allies on the right to duck and run from the bullets of MAGA and far-left activists alike.
Yet 80 Conservative Climate Caucus members in the House, dozens of conservative organizations, and millions of Trump voters support climate action.
This year, President Trump can pander to MAGA culture warriors by scrubbing “climate crisis” and “ESG” from government websites. But next year, he needs mainstream backing to survive the midterms. Let our centrist, conservative, and MAGA allies coalesce as a force from within, and the president will find a way to be their hero.
5. Shake up your funding and embrace diverse passions and powers. The dominant funding model— three-year grants with inflexible deliverables, reflecting a fixed five-year plan that was probably out-of-date the moment the board finally adopted it — discourages adaptive learning. Both political actors and markets can shift much more rapidly in response to reality.
Instead, fund a variety of mainstream civic, service, and community organizations as well as messy organic grassroots campaigns that represent a range of voices and strengths. Invite these to adapt to change, integrate across divides, and coalesce naturally.
6. Don’t demonize your opponents — at least, not all of them. Fear and demonization raise 2.5 times the money and five times the media as hope and collaboration. But every interest group we demonize drives power and money to our opponents.
We target too many moral enemies, and drive too much money to the political brokers — lobbyists, public relations firms, strategists, pollsters, and the like — who “protect” them. Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Auto, and capitalism are opponents we can’t afford. Recognize that they helped humanity defeat material scarcity and help them discover their next assignment. Welcome them as allies wherever they are and harness their extraordinary engineering, scientific, and political resources to decarbonize.
7. Integrate the best ideas of the left and right. Climate adaptation is wrongly viewed as surrender — a sign of our moral rigidity. It undermines investment in resilient infrastructure, local preparedness, and innovation at the community level. Admitting that damage is real and irreversible is not moral failure — it’s moral realism.
Rather than embrace the best ideas — whether from the right or left — we cling to stereotypes and teach ourselves how to “speak to conservatives” as if every one of “them” was a profit-hungry religious zealot ready to burn down Congress for President Trump. We hire professionals to teach us how to talk to this species of elephant, and persuade them how to think and act like an ass.
Next week, pro-climate donors across all divides will join us at Earthx2025. Among them will be thoughtful conservatives who want to integrate themes of faith, family, patriotism, markets, and fiscal conservatism into climate policy proposals. We’re going to acknowledge our past mistakes and embrace the notion that our job now is to change, because we can still avoid the worst effects of catastrophic climate-funding missteps.
Trammell S. Crow is the founder of EarthX. Bill Shireman is co-curator of EarthX.
The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation), and the Walton Family Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
